Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, received millions of dollars in exchange for consulting, speeches, and paid op-eds, according to financial disclosure documents.

The payments, first reported by Business Insider, include $186,000 from op-eds and speeches alone. Zeldin also disclosed $45,475 in casino gambling winnings. He earned a $775,000 salary from Zeldin Strategies, which he opened after losing the New York gubernatorial race and leaving Congress in 2022, and between $1-5 million dollars in dividends from the firm. 

Zeldin is a conservative Trump ally and friend to the fossil fuel industry whose voting record is “remarkably anti-environment and anti-climate,” according to Food and Water Watch. As a member of Congress, he voted to slash the EPA budget by $2 billion dollars, cheered Trump’s efforts to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, opposed legislation that would restrict corporations’ ability to discharge “forever chemicals” into waterways and supported weakening EPA standards in the Clean Air Act around particulate matter pollution. If he leads the EPA, he is expected to gut environmental regulations and cater to the fossil fuel industry’s demands. He has said that “energy dominance” is one of his top priorities in leading the EPA.

The former congressman’s financial disclosure shows he has been raking in cash in part by writing paid commentaries in prominent news outlets — without disclosing in those pieces that he has been paid to write them. 

In July, Zeldin published a column on Fox News’ website slamming New York’s Democratic attorney general for suing the massive Brazilian beef producer JBS for allegedly misrepresenting its climate impact.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy that the state is now targeting JBS for allegedly misleading consumers for coming up short of [its] 2040 trajectory while the state itself is also failing to meet their own unattainable goals,” Zeldin wrote.

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Zeldin’s financial disclosure shows he was paid $3,000 for that commentary by CRC Advisors, the consulting firm chaired by conservative dark money maven Leonard Leo. While Leo is best known for his work building the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority, his firm has represented corporate clients, including oil and gas giant Chevron. 

The former lawmaker wrote a series of op-eds on behalf of the lobbying firm CGCN Group. Over the past two years, the firm paid $58,000 to Zeldin for columns published in Newsweek, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and Real Clear Policy, plus another $40,000 for commentaries that were not published. 

In the Newsweek column, Zeldin slammed the Retirement Savings for Americans Act, a bill to create a federal retirement account program for workers who aren’t offered employer-sponsored retirement plans. Zeldin argued that the government just wants “to get its hands on more of your hard-earned money so it can set up another massive government retirement program.” 

Around that time, federal records show, CGCN began lobbying for the American Retirement Association, a lobbying group for retirement plan professionals, on “issues related to retirement securities.” The association said the Retirement Savings for Americans Act would “decimate the employer-sponsored retirement system,” because the matching contribution provided by the government would be too generous.

Zeldin separately wrote a column in the New York Post trashing Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign plan to lower housing costs. 

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“These limitations on housing construction have reduced supply, increasing the demand for existing rental units tremendously and inflating costs. Addressing these construction roadblocks is where government action is most urgently required,” he wrote. “Instead, however, the Harris housing plan focuses on creating new regulations that would derail this much-needed building surge from ever occurring — and adding subsidies that would only inflate housing costs.”

The financial disclosure shows he was paid $10,000 for this op-ed by Point Made PR, which says on its website that it specializes in “media placement and grassroots advocacy.” 

“We regularly work with third-party validators — including former legislators, professors, industry experts, political and social influencers, and activists — to publish opinion content demonstrating the merits of our clients’ arguments from an expert outsider’s perspective,” says the firm. “We successfully pitch op-eds all across the country on a weekly basis.”